The premise of cloud is based, like other emergent technologies, at least partially on the notion of abstraction. Cloud providers are able to achieve what appears to be boundless compute, limitless storage and never-ending network capacity by being able to simply “plug and play” the hardware necessary to expand capacity when needed. Enterprises, too, looking to achieve similar capabilities are desirous of a means to achieve this level of simplicity of scale.
And by desirous I mean “really, really, REALLY want” it. At least that’s how I read the fact that the number one “emerging trend” identified by our State of Application Delivery in 2014 survey was – you guessed it – private cloud. In case that’s not enough to convince of its significance, when asked for which initiatives organizations had purchased technology in the past 12 months the number one answer (with 45% of respondents) was – you guessed it – private cloud.
So getting a “plug and play” or Lego-like infrastructure building blocks that can improve the time to deploy and reduce costs while adding value is pretty important to a whole lot of organizations today.